When was sarin first used

There they tested aerial bombs containing tabun and discovered that the most deadly way to deploy the not-so-volatile agent was to use a small detonation to disperse it as a mist. By the end of the war, the factory had produced 12, metric tons of tabun and loaded it into aerial bombs and artillery shells.

In , the German military approved construction of an entirely new sarin factory at Falkenhagen, a site 70 km outside Berlin. Kuhn was an extraordinary chemist—he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his efforts to understand the structure and function of vitamin B and carotene compounds.

They discovered that nerve agents block an enzyme called cholinesterase, which is responsible for breaking down acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that is released into the synapses that connect nerve cells to other nerve cells or muscle cells during electrical signaling. When this enzyme is blocked, nerve cells in the brain and muscles are stuck in an overstimulated state, leading to a wide variety of symptoms including excessive sweating and salivation, pinpoint pupils, vomiting, seizures, and asphyxiation.

As part of their research, Kuhn and colleagues synthesized a brand-new nerve agent, soman, which was twice as good as sarin at inhibiting cholinesterase. Why did Hitler veto their use? Some historians point to the fact that Hitler had been a victim of chemical weapons—probably mustard gas—during WWI. As a result of this experience, Hitler believed using poison gas on the battlefield was unethical, an incredibly inconsistent position given his directive to use Zyklon B and other poisonous gases to kill millions of concentration camp prisoners.

But it might not have been his personal experience that made Hitler stall on deploying nerve agents.

The German Army had had enormous success with its Blitzkrieg strategy: fast and furious attacks using tanks and bombers, followed by foot soldiers. So the use of nerve agents by bombers would have contaminated the very area the army would have then had to occupy.

There was also concern that the Allies had discovered the potent chemical weapons and would retaliate. The Allies had no idea that the German military had discovered and was stockpiling a suite of extraordinarily toxic chemical weapons. But they could, and should, have known.

In May , after Germany lost a six-month battle in Tunisia, Allied forces took some , Axis soldiers prisoner. The page report filed by the interrogators was ignored. Furthermore, after WWII, many former Nazis told blatant lies about their past to improve their image, legitimize their actions, and avoid prosecution.

For example, Speer long claimed he knew nothing of the Holocaust, but documents discovered after his death reveal he was aware of what was happening at the Auschwitz concentration camp. But transporting these munitions to more secure areas was a challenge, in part because many railroad tracks had been bombed and the country was under frequent Allied air strike. In one catastrophic event, U.

In the end, thousands of tabun-filled bombs were transported for safekeeping primarily by barge, along rivers such as the Danube and Elbe. As the Red Army approached the tabun factory at Dyhernfurth, the German military marched thousands of forced laborers off the compounds with little protection from the winter temperatures. Many who survived the exposure were murdered by the German secret police to prevent anyone who had participated in nerve gas production from spreading secrets.

Still, the Russians discovered the tabun and sarin production plants, and once they found out about the new nerve agents, they disassembled the factory and reassembled it in Stalingrad. As Allied scientists discovered that some German munitions contained a potent, unknown organophosphorus nerve agent that was much more toxic than anything they had in their own weapons inventory, they began to scramble to get their hands on the military spoils. Soon the Americans and British pooled resources and began searching for and rounding up scientists involved in chemical weapons research: When they arrested tabun inventor Schrader at his home, he immediately handed over chemical formulas and other details of the nerve agents.

As tensions rose between the U. In the U. As a result, U. Army recruiters whitewashed the files to remove Nazi affiliations, wrote new biographies for the scientists, and issued them military security clearance and tickets to America. The most famous beneficiary of Operation Paperclip was Wernher von Braun, who headed Nazi missile research, was a Nazi Party member, and then went to work for the U.

His expertise is widely cited as one reason U. Dozens of chemists were also recruited to work on chemical weapons at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and on synthetic fuels with the U. Bureau of Mines. The British Army had a similar program called Operation Matchbox. Working with other scientists, these former enemy chemists went on to help design, militarize, and stockpile next-generation nerve agents until the Chemical Weapons Convention entered into force five decades later, in This history of nerve agents was assembled from Jonathan B.

The word sarin is an acronym for the names of the four scientists who developed it. Later, the Nazi government told Schrader to forget about insects and focus on weaponizing sarin as soon as possible. In , the Chemical Weapons Convention , an arms-control treaty ratified, at present, by states, banned sarin, classifying it as a Schedule-1 chemical.

Astonishingly, if yesterday's attack did use sarin, it would be only the fourth confirmed use of the agent as a weapon in history—two of them apparently by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during the Syrian Civil War. The first occurred on March 16, , at the end of the Iran-Iraq war. In the Kurdish town of Halabja, about a dozen miles from the Iranian border, Iraqi aircraft appeared overhead and spread poisonous gas , killing over 5, people.

It later became clear that the U. Families in Halabja were utterly disoriented by the attack, as they watched birds fall from trees and animals and neighbors collapse to the ground, writhing in pain.

The second confirmed use of sarin occurred on March 20, , when the Japanese new religious movement known as Aum Shinrikyo released the gas on three subway lines in Tokyo, killing 12 and injuring and producing symptoms in thousands of others. Like, if I inhaled any more, all my guts would come spilling right out of my mouth. The two most-recent cases of weaponized sarin use occurred during the Syrian Civil War.

On August 21, , according to the United Nations , areas in East Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, were struck by Assad-regime rockets containing sarin. While estimates of the death toll vary, the U. The report also places the blame squarely on the Assad regime, and dismissed its claim that the rebels themselves had launched the attack to invite international sympathy.

They brokered a temporary ceasefire with the regime and the rebels and made straight for Ghouta. Video reports from the area showed hospital staff overwhelmed and desperate. Never before had UN inspectors worked under such pressure and in the midst of a war zone. Their convoy was shot at. But their page report was completed in record time. Sarin was that breed of accident that scientists come to regret. Its inventors worked on insecticides made from organophosphate compounds at the notorious IG Farben chemical company in Nazi Germany.

In , they hit on substance , a formula that caused massive disruption to the nervous system. The chemical name was isopropyl methylfluorophosphate, but the company renamed it sarin to honour the chemists behind the discovery — Schrader, Ambros, Ritter and Van der Linde — according to Benjamin Garrett's book The A to Z of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Warfare. The chemical they created had the grim distinction of being many times more lethal than cyanide. Substance is not hard to make, but it is hard to make without killing yourself.

There are more than a dozen recipes that lead to sarin, but all require technical knowhow, proper lab equipment and a serious regard for safety procedures. One major component is isopropanol, more commonly known as rubbing alcohol. Another is made by mixing methylphosphonyl dichloride with hydrogen or sodium fluoride.

But methylphosphonyl dichloride is not easy to come by. Under the Chemical Weapons Convention it is listed as a schedule 1 substance, making it one of the most restricted chemicals in existence. Last year, the US and other countries stepped up efforts to block sales to Syria of chemicals that might be used to make sarin.

But the country had already amassed substantial stocks of the precursors needed to make the agent. This month, it emerged that Britain had approved export licences to Syria for the sale of more than four tonnes of sodium fluoride between and , though business secretary Vince Cable said there was no evidence they had been used in the Syrian weapons programme.

The exports came on top of sales approved last year for sodium and potassium fluoride under licences that were later revoked on the grounds that they could be used in the manufacture of weapons. Though referred to as a nerve gas, sarin is a liquid at temperatures below C.

To maximise its potential as a weapon, the substance is usually dispersed from a canister, rocket or missile in a cloud of droplets that are fine enough to be inhaled into the lungs. Inevitably, some evaporates into gas, much as spilt water turns into vapour. The chemical enters the body through the eyes and skin too. Sarin has no smell or taste and is colourless, so the first people may know of its use is when victims start to fall.

Sarin takes such a dreadful toll on the body by interfering with a specific but crucial aspect of the nervous system. It blocks an enzyme called acetylcholinesterase, with devastating consequences. Nerves that usually switch on and off to control muscle movements can no longer be switched off.

Instead, they fire constantly. There are mild effects: the eyes become irritated, the vision blurred; people's pupils shrink, they drool and vomit. Then there are the lethal effects. Breathing becomes laboured, shallow, erratic.

Unable to control their muscles, victims have convulsions. The lungs secrete fluids and when people try to breathe, foam comes from their mouths, often tinged pink with blood. A lethal dose can be just a few drops and can kill in one to 10 minutes.

If people survive the first 20 minutes of a sarin attack, they are likely to live. Soon after sarin was invented, the recipe for the agent was passed to the German army, which set about manufacturing stocks of the weapon.